|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
March 27, 2009It’s all a load of rubbish!(or garbage, in America)THANKS, DAVEIt’s about time. Someone finally told me I’m full of shit. It was about time, among other things—my column “I Want Everything!’ in which I made the comment: “I love living with cats. They are expert at the here and now.” “WHAT DO YOU THINK OF HIS TALK?”asked Eckhart Tolle of his own program in Marin last May, playing devil’s advocate. “Well he’s got a few points there but on the other hand….” “I read another book last week, where it said the opposite of what he said, so I have to try to…” “He says there’s no time but I absolutely disagree with that.” “It’s all a load of rubbish (or garbage, in America).” After all, Tolle sounds like New Age, OK, rubbish. But it’s actually radical. “It is a new way of being in the world,” he says. “You are no longer primarily a time-based entity called a person, sustained by continuous thought activity…The shift is being a thought-based ‘entity’ to an awareness-based ‘entity.’ “ There are those pesky words again, attempting to define something—you (the ‘entity’)—that is so much more than any definition thereof. In the space between two thoughts, he says, is consciousness, the stillness before the thought. It is in this space that you realize that the aliveness of all living things and the aliveness of yourself, are one and the same stillness… CHRIST, WHAT BULLSHITWell, for God’s sake, who can remain in that moment between two thoughts? It’s all well and good, etc. Who can do it? Buddha…and the Buddha within you. And cats. My friend says they can afford to be experts at presence because:
I STAND MY GROUNDFeral cats, I propose, are equally ensconced in the present as domestics. Their reality is harsher, according to human standards, but you don’t have to have it easy to be present, or to “stare at eternity.” Cats are always being what they are, where they are, and doing what they’re doing. Not so people, who are constantly thinking about, noticing, observing, complaining about, reporting on Twitter, what they’re doing. A feral cat may be hungry, hunting for food, or he may be under a porch hiding from the rain, or enjoying lying in the sun. These are all primal, things we—humanity—did when we lived in a cave. We didn’t think “I’m hungry” because there was no need to do so. We were hunger. If you step on your housecat’s tail, he will howl with pain, but a moment later, he’s purring in your lap. If someone suspicious arrives, he may hide, but later come out and sniff at your visitor. It all depends on the moment. They are unself-conscious. Zzyzzy doesn’t look in the mirror and admire his half-black, half-pink nose. He doesn’t even know what a face is. Cats are never at a loss for what to do next. They don’t narrate their lives like I do in this column. They don’t observe what they’re doing, they don’t dwell on what they did, they don’t anticipate what they’ll be doing tomorrow; they have no such concepts, whereas I might be thinking, that was a delightful concert today, but I should have been working on my book. I’m writing this column now, but I really should be working on my book. When I’m finished working on this column, I’ll definitely work on my book. CATS JUST ARE.There’s no should have, no “wish I were a dog,” no “I slept enough today, better get off my butt.”
Feline supremacy struggle Besides, we invite these animals to live with us. We enter into a good-faith contract to care for these creatures and give them a good life. I don’t serve them, I provide for them. I give them Friskies, they give me joy. Even-steven. AND JUST WHAT IS ITthat needs consolation (hhmph!) anyway, if to BE life in the form of a human being is not enough to satisfy one? That one is thrust into life and willy nilly must live it, taking the bad with the good, including the responsibilities of paying your way through this life? But If it’s not bad enough to want to shuffle off this mortal coil, how does one alleviate the admittedly inevitable sufferings of life? I’m assuming most people do want to rid themselves of suffering, discounting those who are addicted to it, or just like a bit of variety in their lives. I’m bored, I might like to get my leg or my heart broken. IT MAY SOUND GLIBand simplistic, but it’s all in one’s stance in life. You could say, “I am going to my job I hate,” or you could say, “I am going to spend the day paying my bills and supporting my family.” Or, “I am enacting a necessary stage in a process of growing.” “I am learning what I do and don’t want.” “I am grateful to have what so many others need.” “I’m going to spend my day hating what I’m doing,” could be “I’m going to spend my day being grateful for the air I breathe, the legs that take me where I need to go, the life I am.” Whatever it takes, however corny it sounds. I quoted Eckhart Tolle last time: “You are the consciousness that illuminates the world. Know yourself as that, and that’s freedom.” OK, fine, as my friend Bill would say. But you can’t walk around always saying to yourself, “I am the consciousness that illuminates the world,” finding every blade of grass a miracle. I BEG TO DIFFER.That IS the transformation! You DO walk around “saying” what there is no need to say. You are that light. It’s a different way to live. Have you never experienced a horrible situation that still seemed to be infused with holiness? A feeling that God is present, such as one of the survivors of the famous Andes soccer team airplane crash, in the film “Alive,” experiences in the mountains, a mystic vibration that makes the moment vivid and sacred? YOU HAVE TO TOSS WORDS OUTand enter that realm of experience in which you are one with all; where, as Tolle put it, “oneness with what is” is our primary purpose in life. To be where you are, doing what you are doing. Wherever you are, whatever that thing you are doing—including suffering pain, starvation, a gunshot wound, whatever the circumstance may be—you might experience that unbearable lightness of being. As Tolle has it, words are only “markers” that “point” at concepts that are too big to define by language. As soon as one defines (“names” something) everything else that it is not, is excluded from the definition. An ocean is not a flower, a bird is not a dog, a person is not a tree, but all these things are life forms. They are life. We apply these definitions to our thoughts and concepts, and ourselves. Capitalism is not Socialism is not Communism. “I think such and such a thing.” “Well, you’re a reactionary,” “you’re a libertarian,” “you’re an idiot.” “You call yourself progressive? I don’t think so!” “LIFE,” “NATURE,” “THE UNIVERSE,”“elemental forces,” “God,” are piss-poor attempts to reign in that which is beyond containment. There are no definitions out there in space, just what is, behaving in the manner that it does. If you want to call that dying star a supernova, fine. Then you can talk about it with someone. But it was what it was before anyone named it, an event in eternity. And before I named it “an event in eternity.” Tolle’s “power of now” works for me, speaks loudly to me, because I have felt myself crippled by, nonfunctioning in, and betrayed in my humanity by the 9-to-5 mentality and superstructure of the world. I have felt it, and feel it, like a vise on my brain, this parade of seconds, minutes, hours, days, weeks, months, years and the things you must achieve within them. To rid myself of it is the hardest thing I have spent my life seeking to achieve. So ingrained is it, even more than two years without steady employment have not rid me of this tyranny. I CAN’T OPERATE SANELYin that sphere in which everything happens at a given time. I don’t fit into time slots. At such and such an hour you wake up, you eat, you work, you come home, you relax, you eat, you sleep. At a prescribed moment, which can be found only on the artificial grid of the time continuum as defined by clocks and calendars, the movie you want to see will begin, your dinner reservations await you, the report is due in to your boss, you’re meeting a friend for cocktails—and you have only so much time to fit your day into before that moment arrives. It is only when I acutely feel myself “glowing,” (I don’t know how else to describe it) that I enter that realm of non-time I call “the zone.” It may be the flash of a glimpse under the grid, it may be “mind-expanding” drugs, it may be music that puts me there, but staying in that zone is enlightenment. It all boils down to seeing things as they are, being at one with the scene and radiating and absorbing life. It feels utterly peaceful, and joyous. Even the wood in a bench can speak to me of the lives it has known. This is reality, not glum acquiescence to the unpleasant aspects of life. “A CHILD’S WORLDis fresh and new and beautiful, full of wonder and excitement,” wrote Rachel Carson in The Sense of Wonder. “It is our misfortune that for most of us that clear-eyed vision, that true instinct for what is beautiful and awe-inspiring, is dimmed and even lost before we reach adulthood. If I had influence with the good fairy who is supposed to preside over the christening of all children I should ask that her gift to each child in the world be a sense of wonder so indestructible that it would last throughout life, and an unfailing antidote against the boredom and disenchantments of later years, the sterile preoccupation with things that are artificial, the alienation from the sources of our strength.” She continues,
IT’S ALL ABOUT SEEING.That is what my book is about, if about something it must be. If it must fit into a genre in order to place it on a given shelf. That’s why I call Jerry Seinfeld a genius. Because it’s about nothing. It’s the recognition of no-thing-ness. There is no genre. It’s life. DOME SWEET DOMESome night when the Symphony is not playing and Davies Hall is dark, take a walk on the east side of Van Ness Ave. from Grove St. to Hayes St., and gaze up at the hall as you move. You will see one of the most exhilarating and spectacular sights in San Francisco, that I don’t know that anyone else has noticed: a different aspect of the dome of City Hall, reflecting pane by pane in the dark windows of the curving “piano keyboard” façade. It makes me hyperventilate, one of those only in SF phenomena you have to be tuned into to appreciate. It’s all about seeing. I’m always saying things like “that’s not what God wants of me,” or “the universe has something else in mind for me,” and I believe those things, within the context of knowing I can’t really define in words what this feeling is of the certainty that I am here for a reason unique to me. We, collectively, are here to grow and evolve—you, me and humanity. I’m not talking about predetermination or destiny. I’ve noted before that the “past” and the “future” as we envision them, coincide in the Now. This moment, you are in the future you imagined in the past, and also in the past of the future you are imagining today. To this extent, I no longer feel the truth of the idea, “It is written,” which as a writer is a wonderfully romantic notion to me, but the Now is constantly creating itself. HOW CORNY,how bullshit it sounds to say, as I myself do—I’ll put it in a block quote like I do when quoting other people:
Of course it sounds like bullshit! But it is, fundamentally, a different way of being, existing. See, I don’t “work.” I am not employed. I am free from the politics of the workplace. Of course! I can afford to sit on my couch and spout bullshit! I have nothing else to do! (Actually, I do. You just don’t see me doing it.) An English professor once wrote on a paper of mine that I had first-rate talent as a critic and that for me to not go to graduate school “(unless [I had] something better to do) is to throw away something valuable.” DID I?Did I throw that something away? I didn’t see the value of graduate school, to me it was four more years of spouting bullshit, as I’d just spent four years doing. I didn’t want to teach, I didn’t want to publish critical articles, I didn’t believe grad school would make me a better writer. I believed writing would do that. I did write, a lot. But It turns out, I spent the better part of the next twenty years having nervous breakdowns, even though my friends, and I, might not have recognized them as such. While pausing for thought, I admire an ornate finial I have on a living room lamp; seeing it lit from beneath reminds me that, seen in the right light, anything can seem extraordinary, just by virtue of being what it is.
I feel like I’ve said this before, or seen this before…the finial reminds me of a flame, of a deer’s antlers, an insect with pincers, plant fronds and tendrils, a bygone time and place, it reminds me of being high on mushrooms, and seeing the world exactly as is, but glowing with magic. Once you’ve seen the world like that, you realize you can always see the world like that. It’s all about seeing. I just went into the bathroom and washed my hands in darkness, then looked up at my silhouette in the mirror, and it was surrounded by a glowing golden halo produced by my patterned frosted glass window with a couple of neighbor’s lights behind it. I stood at the sink for a couple minutes, staring at this spectacular display, and saw the holiness in myself. “LOVE IS RECOGNITION OF YOURSELF,”said Tolle.
Yes, it does sounds like rubbish. On the crowded subway on the way to your hated job, the “isn’t that wonderful” glowing holy halo fades around the harsh realities of life. OK, however you want it. If you need me, I’ll be on the couch spouting bullshit, with a shit-eating grin on my face.
The author thinks that what she sees in front of her, is wonderful. ------------------------------------------------------------ Day becomes night becomes day becomes night
One man's rubbish is another man's garbage; one man's bullshit is another man's manure. copyright Alexandra Jones 2009 |
 |
 |
 |
 |
